What does Vivian's dying teach her about death

Vivian, a woman who is a tough professor doesn’t realize that she isn’t really living life until she is diagnosed with cancer. The film shows flashbacks of Vivian’s life before finding out that she has cancer; we see how indifferent she is to the world around her. However, as Vivian has to cope with the high chance of dying, she begins to realize how unresponsive she was to real life. In one of her flashbacks, we see how her professor insists that Vivian go outside rather than go back to the library because her professor wants Vivian to experience life rather than just read it from books. Vivian doesn’t listens because at the time, she doesn’t understand what her professor meant by living life. To her, life is going to the library, studying and working. She isn’t able to appreciate life as others would because she is too wrapped up in getting the right answer in her paper and emphasizing the importance of John Donne’s poetry.

Her obsession with John Donne is what prevents her from experiencing life as she should have. Until being diagnosed with cancer, she isn’t able to really grasp what John Donne meant. While dying though, she seems to come to the realization that in order to understand something you have to live it first hand. In order to understand death in ‘‘Death, be not Proud’’ she has to go through death itself. While slowly dying, Vivian observes how her doctors act with no emotion like robots programmed to find how long the drugs can make her last. During this process, she realizes how inhumane she was with her own students. Since she didn’t live her life to the fullest, she had no communication skills. She saw others as insufficient beings who would never really understand poetry like she did. What she failed to see at the time was that she was actually the one who wasn’t able to fully comprehend John Donne’s poetry because she herself hadn’t lived her life as she could have. In this sense, dying taught Vivian that treating people with respect and dignity is just as vital in life as experiencing life first-hand.

In my opinion, dying has taught Vivian that she hadn’t lived life until she begins to die. Dying is a part of life that is just like any other lesson we daily learn. The nurse and her professor help her realize how much she has missed in her life and as Vivian speaks of her regrets of such actions. She learns that having dignity and treating others like normal human beings is only just part of life. The majority of life is living it as it comes and not being obsessed with concepts that you are not able to understand until you actually live it (in this case death in John Donne’s poem).